Of all New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises, his plan for government-subsidized grocery stores has resulted in the strongest, and sometimes strangest, ire. Critics have called it bad policy, bad business, and even the tipping point on our slide toward Venezuelan socialist oblivion, oh no!

Today on the show, we have one of the people who consulted with the mayor on his grocery plan: Errol Schweizer, grocery expert, host of the Grocery Nerds podcast. Schweizer argues that, far from an untested policy, many Americans already love government-run grocery stores—they just don’t realize it. Schweizer also dismantles much of the criticism the pilot program has received as we discuss the logistics of scale and how the private sector will actually run the stores. Among many things, we get into how the subsidies will work and grocery policy at large, and get a very frank assessment of what to make of the criticism coming from think tanks like the Manhattan Institute.

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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90.

Matt Stoller is research director at the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.